Factories at Work: The Ferrari Foundry

I’ve sat on this photo for a while now. Partially because I couldn’t identify when this was at Ferrari. If I was a better sportscar trainspotter, I could probably identify the era of this photograph based on the parts in the background. Hell, I’m sure some Ferrari Chat members can identify the technicians in this image. So it’s just been sitting on my hard drive. Were these guys casting 166MM engine cases? or 375 F1 transmission housings?

I don’t know. But this image kept being something I wanted to share, because despite how little I do know about this photo, there’s one thing I’m sure of: It wasn’t that long ago that there wasn’t much difference between a World Championship team and a bunch of SoCal hot rodders.

3 responses to “Factories at Work: The Ferrari Foundry”

I took this into Photoshop, changed it to grayscale (it was RGB), evened out the levels for a full range of tonality after determining where the detail died (the big black box/oven/whatever where the face of the guy on the left in the dark goggles is silhouetted), and then “hyper-sharpened” the row of objects immediately behind the rearmost crucible. The row of objects are cast sumps, but even with the detail tweaked (photo available upon request), I doubt there are many — except perhaps ex-Maranello foundry workers! — who could identify them. Third guy from the right I would guess to be a factory floor manager, judging by the “blitz suit” over his nice clean shirt and tie. Judging by what looks like an electric (rather than pneumatic) motor-driven flexible shaft die grinder, the highly-scientific manual double mold-pour, and the Wildroot Cream-Oil Tony Curtis pompadours, this could be mid ’50s to mid- ’60s. Without more photo detail or an ex Ferrari factory guy, I don’t know how else you’d judge it. I was a great help, huh?